Sean Broihier: We are at 92,000 artists right now. We are adding anywhere from 150 to 300 new artists a day. We will be passing 100,000 artists sometime in March. Our sales for 2012 should be around $15 million....Obviously, we are growing quickly. If word got out that FineArtAmerica was doing incredibly well, then I could have another 200,000 artists sign up overnight. I am not necessarily going to see a correlation in the number of buyers signing up at the same time.

Average annual revenue per artist - $15,000,000 / 100,000 = $150. Some might consider it decent, but no one would call it lucrative.

It was the same problem with stock, even before the impact of digital. When I got into it, I didn't have all that many people shooting similar genres, but as the agency grew, my pictures and I became ever less valuable as many more contributing photographers didn't mean the market had grown - just that more people were feeding it.

I did think of changing agencies to the Image Bank, but I read an article (interview with TIB) in the British Journal of Photography where TIB claimed to have 36,000 images of the Eiffel Tower; the incentive to shoot and supply nos. 36,001 and 36,002 didn't overwhelm me. It didn't really matter about genre, though, because everything was oversubscribed in the picture stock market. Consequently, it was mainly the agencies that were really coining it in at that time because print was still big business, but I think that today, even the agents are having a less than wonderful experience, though I've been away from that world for so long that I can only go by reports from fellow photographers who were contemporaries of mine in the business. Hence my remark the other day that instead of spending time and money shooting stock, I'd have been better off today had I bought a box of collectible watches instead! As bonus, those photo-trips would have been a lot more fun for both my wife and myself had the cameras stayed at home; then we would have been having holidays unmolested by the position of the sun, and other silly considerations like that!

Pixels.com (aka FineartAmerica) is not a scam, but as its owner pointed out, the supply side grows much stronger than the demand. And some of their artists produce exceptional art. Hard to compete in that environment.

Same saturation as with the stock image industry. Ten years ago, in addition to the traditional stock agencies, there were just a handful of microstock agencies with a million or two million images in their databases. Today, there are dozens of such agencies and some of them boast now over 100 million images, most of them produced by image factories in countries with low labour costs, such as Eastern Europe, Asia and South Africa. The image market grew too, but not at the same pace as the supply.